[1]Members of Loyalist College's SIFE team celebrate their win at the Regional Championships.
By Evan Cooke
If you talked to people in the halls of Loyalist College, not everyone would know about their school’s SIFE team.
SIFE, which stands for Students in Free Enterprise, is a non-profit organization that builds teams of volunteers to develop projects that make a difference to the people in their community. It has chapters in many of the post-secondary schools around the country.
This year, in only the second year of the Loyalist team’s existence, they were declared champions at the TD SIFE Entrepreneurship Challenge Regional Championships in Toronto.
The competition was split up, with the Go Green, TD Entrepreneurship, and the Financial Literacy as the three categories. The TD Entrepreneurship category was split into three pools, with Loyalist finishing at the top of theirs.
Loyalist’s win came on the strength of the four main community projects that they’ve founded this year.
The SIFE 4 Life project works with middle school students at Quinte Mohawk Primary School, and helping to empower them and involve them in school life. Currently, they’re training them to be members of the stage crew, and getting them involved activities outside of regular homework.
Let’s Can Hunger is their fundraising effort with Gleaner’s Food Bank to help soften the blow for families who can’t always afford to put food on the table, as well as drawing attention to the issues surrounding poverty.
Helping Entrepreneurs Reach Complete Success, or HERCS, is an initiative that’s been started with current and former military personnel at CFB Trenton. The participants went through seven workshops that taught them how to build their own businesses to bring in more income to support their families.
And the First Glance project has worked with businesses in downtown Napanee to improve their own and attract new businesses. As well as involving inmates at Warkworth Institution, local high school students are also involved, to promote them building a life of their own in town.
It was these types of projects that led to Loyalist’s success, and just as impressive as the win was the fact that Loyalist was the only college in their pool, beating universities like Wilfred Laurier, McGill, Carleton, and Windsor.
But as Loyalist’s SIFE team president Danielle McIsaac said, after meeting all the other teams, the championships were about more than just the final result.
“Every single person in that room is a cheerleader for everybody else who’s doing what they’re doing. It’s not about competing against one another, it’s about collaboratively improving Canada.”
McIsaac, who took over the President’s role in February, is a single mom in the second career program. She’s no stranger to hard work, and says that she can rely on her team not only to work hard on the various projects, but to support each other’s workload as well.
“A big thing is being able to rely on others for help. We all have the same conflicting priorities, but when there’s a task that needs to be done, you know you’ve got a whole team of people willing to help, all you have to do is ask.”
Because he’s a business professor, SIFE faculty advisor Bob Millard says that a lot of students think that the team is exclusive to business students. He says that’s not the case, and that he hopes the team continues to grow.
“My goal is not just business. I would really like to have everybody who’s from every different area actively participate and be proud and showcase it in every area of the college, cause right now it’s viewed as business, and this is really much more than business.”
The Belleville team’s next challenge will come when they present their regional-winning projects at the national competition. It’s on May 10 in Toronto.